facebook messenger

Facebook's Messenger Kids came to Android early this year. The app is meant to provide a safer experience for children 13 and younger, having parents more involved in their online communications than they would otherwise be. If you were ever a child, though, you may remember that kids can be pretty mean. Evidently aware of this, Facebook has announced that Messenger Kids will be getting a number of features that encourage nice behavior.

Facebook continues to run into trouble regarding privacy. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light, many people deleting their Facebook accounts realized that Messenger has been collecting call/SMS metadata for years. Now the company is once again under fire, this time for allowing executives to delete Facebook messages, when normal users never had that option.

BlackBerry Messenger was the iMessage of the late 2000s, especially since it was initially exclusive to the company's own hardware. BBM expanded to iOS and Android in 2013, but it has become mostly irrelevant thanks to competitors like WhatsApp and iMessage. BlackBerry is now suing Facebook and its subsidiaries (including WhatsApp and Instagram), alleging that Facebook is violating numerous BBM patents.

Facebook has to tread carefully when it comes to making products and services for kids under the age of 13. However, it's not like it's hard for kids to lie about their age to gain access to all the wonderful and unspeakably terrible things on the internet. If kids are going to be sending messages over the internet, parents might want to give the child-friendly Messenger Kids a shot. It's launching on Android today with some special Valentine's Day features.

Facebook caught some heat for pushing people to use the Messenger app a few years back, but that may actually have been a kindness. Messenger was a much better app than the main Facebook client. Although, over time Messenger has become rather bloated and clunky in its own right. The head of Messenger now admits the app is too cluttered, and changes are on the way.

Facebook Messenger users in the United States have been able to send money to each other from within the app for quite some time, and that same functionality is now finally making its way to other territories. If you're lucky enough to live in the UK or France, the Send Money feature should be available to you soon, rolling out over the next few weeks.

More than carving pumpkins or gobbling down candy or dressing up in costumes, Halloween is a great excuse to set free your inner dad and go all out on bad puns and cheesy jokes. Facebook is obviously no stranger to a well-placed corny joke, so it's announcing a bunch of "spook-tacular" new effects for the Facebook and Messenger apps that'll help users get into the Halloween spirit.

To call the Facebook suite of apps a bloated mess would be an understatement, most especially the ever-growing Messenger — I think I've used it once, after which I uninstalled it. However, in a surprising turn of events, Facebook has launched the "lite" version of the app in North America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.

You might not have noticed this, but Facebook and Facebook Messenger had different emoji sets. Note the emphasis on "had," because Facebook has just chosen to ditch Messenger's own emojis for the ones that are found in Facebook itself. It's a real tragedy.

IFTTT is a powerful automation tool that can link together many of the popular services we all use every day. The possibilities are almost endless with a bit of imagination. The platform has had a bunch of Facebook applets for some time, but the same couldn't be said for Facebook Messenger, until now.